1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to network communications and more particularly to encoding multicast addresses in a multicast forwarding table for reducing the size of the table.
2. Description of the Related Art
Sizes of forwarding tables in routers in a network that supports multicast increases at least linearly with the number of multicast groups served in the network (at least one new entry is added in the forwarding table for each new multicast group). With the increase of multicast applications in the Internet, this issue poses a considerable scalability issue for the forwarding tables. Few proposals have focused on solving this problem, since solutions rely on fundamentally changing the multicast protocols and architectures that have long been established.